What does this mean? Help!

This popped up under the bell sign at top right corner of my google analytics
What doe s it mean and what do I do about it?

Property Dianes Decoupage **** is receiving hits with missing campaign parameters. Some examples (in the format “Source/Medium/Campaign”) are: google/cpc/(not set). Ensure that links referring to your site have all three campaign parameters filled out.

Diane

Sorry Diane, where GA is concerned, I’m completely in the dark…

I used to get this popping up on mine the odd time, usually if I’d used one of the Google free advertising vouchers that they sent out from time to time.

It’s nothing to worry about if you don’t want it to be, it’s really just Google trying to encourage you to be a bit more organised:)

I did it when I remembered to, but not all the time.

Basically instead of promoting willy nilly you can create a url using their generator for each specific aspect of your promotional efforts so that at the end of the day you can very easily tell what worked and what didn’t.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

It’s handy if, for talk sake, you’re paying for advertising on Facebook while still pootling away on your facebook page. Instead of seeing xx visits from facebook at the end of the day with no real way of telling which were as a result of paid advertising and which came from your own efforts, you can create two campaign urls, one to use yourself and one to give to the advertiser you’re paying, they both look the same but google analytics can tell them apart.

The same goes for google, if you’re paying for a bit of advertising, create a url for it so you can tell the difference between those hits and those coming from organic search.

Chances are you’ve had a flood of visitors from one place and analytics is assumimg it’s a campaign but isn’t sure and it’s nudging you to set one up:)

Hth

Thank you very much for that ,
I had noticed a lot of extra views recently but havent paid for any advertising .
I will just ignore it!
I love folksy folk for helping me out!

Folksy might be paying.

I’m not 100% sure but if folksy are paying, either on a cost per click basis or to have the site appear on Google shopping then analytics might not take account of the fact that someone else is paying for the site as a whole and you’re benefiting from the increased visitors. It’ll just see the increase and that the original source was a paid for thing and ignore the bits in the middle where the visitor passed through the front page/categories/gift guides/other shops before arriving at yours.

It’s why if you check your keywords you’ll sometimes see keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with your shop, you’ll even see other shop names, that just happens to be the last thing someone googled before getting lost in folksy for an hour and every shoo they passed through will see the same keyword associated with their visit:)

thanks leanne . it wasnt folksy shop that it came up as it was the other one that I cant mention!

Ah, they definitely do pay, that much I’m sure about:)

I’ve had that too for a while. It’s something to do with a change that Folksy must have made to the GA code in their pages. The code in their pages is theirs so GA thinks that’s a mistake because it should be our own individual code.

I’ve just been ignoring it since it’s still tracking my visitors okay. Or at least it appears to be! :slight_smile: